Amazon

With heterogeneous characteristics in physical, ecological and political-administrative terms, there is no consensus on the total area occupied by the biome. According to GEO Amazônia¹, in a broad sense, it can be considered to occupy an area of ​​over 8 million km², thus constituting the largest biome in South America. It is present in Brazil, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Venezuela, Guyana, French Guiana, Peru, and Suriname. In Brazil, it occupies over 4 million km², almost 50% of the national territory², sheltering an enormous biodiversity, fascinating for its richness of colors, sizes, shapes, textures, and smells.

The Amazon becomes even larger when we consider the populations that live there. There are cities, towns, and villages throughout the giant biome, often isolated or nearly isolated, giving the region a very low population density. This reveals another richness that the forest harbors: its diversity of traditional peoples and communities, such as Indigenous peoples, rubber tappers, riverside communities, fishermen, and others, who have lived sustainably in the forest for generations through their lifestyles. However, this wealth of people contrasts with the harsh reality of low socioeconomic indices³ and the difficulty in accessing health and education services to which they are subjected.

However, based on the wisdom of their ancestors, these people live off the resources of biodiversity and obtain almost everything they need from there: food, medicine, raw materials to make their utensils, furniture, clothing, and crafts.

Within the forest, they collect and process various fruits and products typical of the biome, such as açaí, Brazil nuts, babassu, pupunha, tucumã, andiroba, maçaranduba, rubber trees, etc. Through this rich biodiversity, there is also a wide production of handicrafts, such as arumã fiber baskets and accessories made from jarina seeds (known as vegetable ivory), among many others, clear expressions of the possibility of using natural resources while keeping the forest standing.

The Amazon holds the largest reserve of tropical timber in the world, and in addition to the vast variety of trees and fruits, the Amazon is home to important fauna that reflects the way of life of its people. Of fish alone, approximately two thousand species inhabit the rivers where riverside dwellers, indigenous people, and artisanal fishermen roam. Fishing is an important source of livelihood and economic growth in the local areas of the biome: Acre, Amapá, Amazonas, Pará, and Roraima, as well as parts of Maranhão, Mato Grosso, Rondônia, and Tocantins.

In this immense biome, one of the most spectacular phenomena silently occurs: a vast number of plants, which inhale carbon dioxide and exhale oxygen, transpire water, release aromatic substances, remove toxic gases from the air, contribute to cloud formation, and feed aerial rivers.⁴ This entire highly intelligent mechanism, dependent on the standing forest, contributes to climate regulation, which provides stability and comfort, in addition to providing the conditions for the maintenance of all biodiversity.

The forest influences the climate through a virtuous cycle, initiated after rain falls on the vegetation and much of the water infiltrates the soil, where it is stored. From there, the tree roots, defying the force of gravity, suck up this water. Traveling up to 60 meters in height, through trunks, branches, and leaves, it evaporates and flows into the atmosphere as vapor. A large tree can transpire over a thousand liters of water in a single day. Considering the size of the Amazon basin, approximately 20 billion tons of water are released into the atmosphere each day. To put this in perspective, this figure is greater than the volume released by the Amazon River into the Atlantic Ocean daily, which corresponds to just over 17 billion tons of water.⁴
What happens to all this water in the atmosphere? Like a great heart, the forest acts as a pump that drives water flows, like aerial rivers, through the hydrological cycle. In this analogy, and considering its size, the Amazon can be considered the heart of the world.⁴ The aerial river transports moisture from one region to another, hence the importance of forest conservation, since the Amazon is the source of the aerial sources of most of the rainfall in South America.

The biome's waters, besides their great environmental and climatic importance, hold a strong symbolic meaning for the forest's populations. History tells of an expedition along the river that the Spanish encountered an indigenous people composed entirely of women.⁵ They alluded to the Amazons, warriors depicted in Greek mythology, which later gave their name to the river, the state, and the biome. The Amazon basin is the largest in Brazil and on the planet, with approximately 6 million square kilometers and 1.100 tributaries; the Amazon River is the second-longest river in the world, second only to the Nile.

It's no coincidence that the song "this river is my street" exists, for surrounded by dense forest, it is only by river that many villages can navigate the biome. It is in these freshwaters that the forest peoples also live their beliefs, cultures, and values, passed down through generations. The famous Círio de Nazaré ritual, the folklore of Sairé, the pink dolphin ritual, the Tucandeira ritual, and other manifestations demonstrate that the mysticism of its peoples echoes within the meanders of this vast forest.